Foreign Journalists

When British journalist Elena Lappin arrived in Los Angeles in May, on assignment for a British newspaper, little did she know she would end up being the subject of her story. By her own account in The Times later that month, Lappin was interrogated for four hours, subjected to a body search, fingerprinted, photographed, handcuffed and forced to spend a night in a cell in downtown L.A. and a day as a detainee at the airport before being deported to London. Lappin's crime?

They came from all over the world, journalists from 17 media organizations representing 14 countries and five continents, to collect the prize they had sought for months: about 10 minutes of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's time. Deluged since his inaugural by hundreds of requests from foreign journalists to interview California's foreign-born governor, Schwarzenegger's aides declared Friday "International Media Day." From 9:30 a.m.

An international journalists' rights watchdog group has accused U.S. officials of trying to restrict press freedoms by hindering the entry of foreign reporters into the United States. The charge follows the recent detention and deportation of a British freelance journalist in what representatives of Reporters Without Borders said was part of a disturbing pattern of restrictions against foreign journalists trying to enter the country on assignment.

A leading Polish war correspondent and an Algerian colleague were killed south of this capital city Friday when their car was raked by machine-gun fire on a remote stretch of road that is notorious for deadly ambushes. Waldemar Milewicz, 48, an award-winning television journalist who had covered conflicts in Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda, was killed about 30 miles south of Baghdad as he and his crew were driving to cover fighting in Najaf.

King Abdullah II pardoned a Japanese journalist Monday who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for accidentally killing a Jordanian airport guard with a cluster bomb in his luggage. Hiroki Gomi, 36, had taken the bomb from Iraq as a souvenir. He was passing through security at the Amman airport May 1 when an X-ray machine detected the bomb. It exploded as the guard searched the bag, killing him and wounding three other people.

Four journalists detained for a week in Baghdad said Wednesday that they feared for their lives "every second" they were held in Iraq's most notorious prison. Newsday correspondent Matt McAllester, 33, and photographer Moises Saman, 29, were freed Tuesday after a week in Abu Ghraib prison, along with Molly Bingham, a freelance photographer from Louisville, Ky., and Danish freelance photographer Johan Rydeng Spanner. Their expulsion came amid a growing crackdown on foreign journalists in Baghdad.

After 11 tense days in rebel captivity during which they were moved to five jungle camps and played gin rummy to pass the time, two freelance journalists kidnapped in violent northeastern Colombia while on assignment for the Los Angeles Times were freed Saturday. Reporter Ruth Morris, 35, and photographer Scott Dalton, 34, were unexpectedly handed over to the Red Cross by the leftist National Liberation Army, or ELN, at a remote rebel camp in Arauca province.

About 75 Colombian and foreign journalists gathered in this capital's central square Friday to demonstrate their solidarity with two Western journalists kidnapped by leftist guerrillas while on assignment for the Los Angeles Times. Waving placards and white flags bearing the images of Scott Dalton, 34, a photographer from Conroe, Texas, and Ruth Morris, 35, a British-born reporter who was raised in the Los Angeles area, the group chanted, "Journalists are not part of the conflict!"

The United States has a good story about democracy, free markets, individual rights. U.S. embassies should be telling it loudly abroad, their voices amplified by U.S.-financed broadcasting operations like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. The way not to tell it is by surreptitiously putting foreign journalists on the CIA or the Defense Department payroll. That taints the information and imperils reputations and lives when the payoffs become known, as they eventually do.

CHINA * China opened two bases to scores of foreign journalists in an unusual, closely supervised effort to demonstrate the world's largest military's ability to protect the most populous nation on Earth. Some critics, both within and outside the People's Liberation Army, say its 2.5 million soldiers are undertrained and under- equipped despite China's efforts to modernize military technology and expand its cache of weapons.